12 March 2009, 15:08

Debian Project updates Package Policy

Russ Allbery, a member of the Debian Policy team, has announced the release of version 3.8.1 of the Debian Policy, which includes the first round of Policy changes for the next major version of Debian, code named "squeeze".

Compared to version 3.8.0, which was introduced with the release of of version 5.0 of Debian (Lenny), only a few details have changed. All package manager related files, including descriptions of the licence, must be encoded in UTF-8. There is also now a single standardised format for the changelogs.

The main change for developers and package maintainers is that they need to take into account that the /var/run and /var/lock directories may be mounted as temporary file systems and in a RAM disk, not the hard drive. This means that any files created there will be lost after a system restart. Init scripts must therefore create any necessary subdirectories dynamically. In addition, the init scripts are now required to recognise if an action is already running and not start the daemon again.

The Package Policy has also been updated on the Debian website.

(crve)

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